This is not my call, but in the traditional Racket convention of
everyone voicing thoughts...
One gentle way to communicate awareness and intent of inclusiveness:
"The Racket community enjoys and appreciates a collegial and
helpful atmosphere, in which everyone feels welcome. We expect that
everyone will have a good experience at RacketCon, and that everyone
will help to make it a good experience for everyone else. Any concerns
or suggestions, small or large, please feel encouraged to approach any
conference organizer or core Racket person."
What the above doesn't address: whether there should be a CoC explicit
itemization of rules. There's a breadth of thoughtful opinions on that
question, and it's complicated. My thoughts have changed a bit as a
result of this thread, and a decision would seem to come down to
balancing goals and guessing, so I'd just like to toss out a few thoughts:
* It is important to acknowledge that inclusiveness is an issue, and to
communicate good intent about inclusiveness. That's part of what people
are looking for.
* Some of the CoCs that people cited in this thread included rules that
I know *aren't* universally-accepted in broad IT conference circles.
(One, relatively light, example: many people assume that everyone at a
conference doesn't mind being photographed and tagged in Facebook and
such, but I've heard from a few PL people who absolutely do mind, to the
point that they've avoided some events for that reason. The heavier
examples include things like very different ideas about the
appropriateness of "flirting" in various contexts, and different
understandings of how discouraging unwanted attention like that can
be.) Whether there will be sufficient universally-accepted behavior in
future years of RacketCon, as it hopefully grows, I don't know.
* I think that Racket is an unusually (not "usually"; typo in an earlier
message) good community, and, AFAIK, has a good track record on
inclusiveness. (Though I want to see a lot more female names in "From:"
headers on this email list!)
* I suspect Fortune 500 corporate lawyers could go either way (on CoC
vs. welcoming statement), out of purely risk-averse intent. Racket is
not a Fortune 500, and it is driven mostly by universities, which are
supposed to have broadly constructive intent.
* Sometimes a gentle position is blind to problems. In this particular
case, I suspect we can afford gentle.
* I think this is probably a situation in which implicit high
expectations elevate everyone.
* There's been a lot of awareness-raising in this thread, and in recent
history of other conferences, which helps.
* In activism, some of the most encouraging stories are from when
something was starting to go bad, but then people stepped up, with
grace. (Ambiguity: when is the occasion to step up, and what is the
graceful move.)
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